A South Chicago museum campus (featuring a Lucas museum) with ferries and improved train service would be a very cool idea.

BlueFairlane

Unfortunately, just like the Soldier Field parking lot, the US Steel site is also on landfill poking out into reclaimed lake and is just as much subject to public trust lawsuits. If Friends of the Parking Lots is to be consistent, they’d be just as likely to devote years to court battles there. Lucas would be foolish to jump right back into that mess.

Kevin M

I question the perceived (and also vaguely stated) value that the Lucas Museum would have brought to Chicago. His name, movies, and other “narrative art” have no strong historical ties to Chicago. Our city has museums that actually relate to our land and culture much more deeply. How profitable are these?

I don’t care much if this or any other museum is built on private, non-lakefront land without subsidies. But this museum has very little connection to Chicago, so it should never have been considered for public subsidy. Shame on the mayor for spending any time or words on a project with an unsupported, exaggerated perception of value to our city.

Now, here’s a museum that is sorely overdue for Chicago: a bicycle museum. Chicago has an awesome, rich history with the bicycle. Along with a main, permanent installation for Chicago’s manufacturing history with bicycles (goes well beyond Schwinn, though that would be a big spotlight), there could be exhibits on Critical Mass (over 20 years of history in Chicago), messengers & cargo uses, modern manufacturing, etc. Put that on the lakefront, keep it publicly-owned, and it would make a great addition to our city’s stock of museums.

Chicagoan

444 units/181 spots is a pretty nice ratio for what I’ll assume is to be a “luxury” condo tower.

The fact that that the US Steel site never was turned over the government/public pretty much exempts it. The FOTP issue with the Lucas Museum was that the land was controlled by the city (and by the way, was supposed to be converted to parkland by now) and was also lake infill, and thus the doctrine applied.

By your reading of the public trust doctrine, no new buildings would ever again be built in parts of Streeterville.

BlueFairlane

That’s not my reading of public trust doctrine. It’s the reading of Friends of the Parks.

Pat

Rather it’s your interpretation of their reading.

rohmen

Value, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. I wholly disagree that the Lucas Museum would have added little value, and I don’t recall the Museum of Science and Industry ever having problems with attendance at special exhibits that revolved around things like sci fi movies and star wars. More people appreciate the “narrative arts” than people want to admit, and I think Lucas’s collection has as much connection to this City as the beloved french impressionist collection at the Art Institute, or the Ancient Egyptian collection at the Field.

I would love to have a bicycle museum here, but there’s some irony I think in suggesting that because Schwinn mass-produced bicycles here for 20 years such a museum would have more of connection to the City than a museum that celebrates film when literally 100s of movies (many iconic) and tv shows have been filmed in this city over that same 20 year period.

Pat

Makes you wonder about the disparity between developers. I’ve seem time and time again people claiming you can’t sell a luxury condo without a parking spot, yet this developer doesn’t think that this the case.